The Sacramento Bee asked me for my take on the question of whether Sacramento ought to spend $200 million to subsidize a new arena for the Sacramento Kings and the National Basketball Association. You can read my answer on the Bee’s site.

The Bee gave me only 800 words, so I wasn’t able to flesh out the argument as well as I would have liked. Fortunately, we have the web for that.

Given more space, I would have also repeated what I wrote here last spring: The best way to limit the extortion game is for the California Legislature to prevent the billionaire sports owners and their leagues from playing city against city. It should ban any local jurisdictions from using public funds to subsidize professional sports teams.

California is at a critical moment on this issue.

The extortionists are on the attack right now all over the state: Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Clara, Anaheim, Los Angeles. But as we all know, from the news and daily life, core California public services reducing the state’s quality of life. Every public dollar extorted today steals from California’s future.

Ideally, local politicians would do the right thing. But there’s something about sports that makes them go weak in the knees and soft in the head. (My wife blames it on testosterone poisoning.) They need to be saved from themselves with a law that protects them against their worst instincts.

That law would set budget priorities right at a time when we need to be putting first things first. But it would also send a bracing message to the rest of the country. If California cities, home to one in eight Americans, can no longer be used as leverage in the extortion game, other states will gain some protection, and perhaps even be encouraged to protect their taxpayers as well as California does.

Contrary to the moans of the extortionists, that wouldn’t mean the end of pro sports. As Scott Lewis points out, at Voice of San Diego, we would then be on track to replace sports socialism with true sports capitalism. And who can disagree with that?

The California Fix

Their fast-paced and often humorous narrative deftly exposes the origins of our current political and fiscal problems—from the ugly 1879 constitutional convention to Hiram Johnson’s Progressive reforms to the Prop 13 tax revolt and its legacy of supermajority requirements and voter initiatives.

Mathews and Paul then furnish an uniquely California fix: innovative solutions that allow Californians to debate their choices, settle on the best ones, hold elected officials accountable for results, and choose anew if something doesn’t work.